I’m about halfway into Egan’s Incandescence. So far, so good. It mixes a story of citizens of a galactic civilization where everyone chooses their own reality to inhabit, the kind of post-human world many of his books have pointed to, with a world where the inhabitants are grasping to understand their own surroundings. Those latter sections have an almost old-fashioned hard SF feel to them, lots of talk of math and science and deductions about the nature of reality, the kind of SF where the setting is at least as big a character as any of the people.

About Jeff VanderMeer

Photo by Kyle Cassidy

Jeff VanderMeer's most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), released in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Foreign rights have sold in 17 countries and the movie rights have been acquired by Paramount Pictures/Scott Rudin Productions. His latest nonfiction books include Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (Abrams Image). His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Atlantic.com, Vulture.com, and the Los Angeles Times. VanderMeer recently taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and has lectured at MIT and the Library of Congress. You can contact him at pressinfo at vandermeercreative.com. (Author photo by Kyle Cassidy.) More...